The merry, mighty and mighty merry Jane Lynch (Glee, Hollywood Game Night) saunters into the Jaeb Theater this weekend for a retro-Christmas cabaret concert featuring her pals Kate Flannery (Meredith on The Office) and the dashing Tim Davis. Caught in the Act caught up with Jane on the phone recently to get the buzz about her show A Swingin’ Little Christmas.
Caught in the Act: Hi, Jane. We can’t wait for you to get down here to Tampa.
Jane Lynch: Me too! I’m so thrilled. Can’t wait.
CITA: We can’t wait either and you’re gonna be in the best space, too. Wait until you to see the cabaret space that we have. You’re gonna love it.
JL: Great!
CITA: Let’s talk about you growing up and then we’ll head into the A Swingin’ Little Christmas show which we’re so excited about. So, at what point in your life did you figure out that you were funny?
JL: It wasn’t like a startling revelation, and it wasn’t something that I would proudly say, “I’m funny.” But I love to laugh. I have spent my life finding the funny in any situation—it’s never too soon for me. And although I might not say it publicly, inside I’ll always have a joke about something, just horrible. Ironically, that puts it in a place … you can have a good belly laugh. It’s a gift I was born with. My family is the exact same way. We are always miming things for the irony and not gut laughs, a lot of it is always smirky kind of laughs—like little funny laughs. But that’s kind of where I come from and I am on a relentless search for the funny in a situation. It’s a very, very satisfying path.
CITA: You had two siblings, right? You grew up south of Chicago … did you have an older sister and a younger brother?
JL: Yes.
CITA: What were the three of you like growing up? Were you cutting up? Were you giving your parents all kinds of fits? Were you testing out material?
JL: Well my brother and I had very much the same sense of humor—he’s two years younger than I am. My sister was a little apart from that … she could laugh but she was driven, from almost the moment she was born, to leave our family and start her own. She loves kids. She loves … you know, she’s a stellar teacher. But my brother and I certainly shared a lot of laughs growing up. We watched television together, we would re-enact scenes and, yeah, we loved it.
My parents loved to sing. My parents were really funny, too, but they loved to sit around the kitchen table after dinner and sing. I would join them after a while. My sister would roll her eyes and go to bed and my brother too. But I loved doing that.
CITA: Did they play instruments? Did somebody play the piano or you would just sit around and sing songs?
JL: No, it was all a capella. We loved musicals, and my father was a great harmonizer and my mother loved to sing. They knew all the songs from the musicals—all the songs from their day, which would was in the late 40’s, early 50’s. That’s how I fell in love with that music, like Glenn Miller and we wouldn’t sing that of course because that’s instrumental, but Bing Crosby and Perry Como. Rosemary Clooney. My mother could sound and looked a lot like Rosemary Clooney. Yeah, so we had a great musical education growing up. I didn’t know it was an education, I just knew it was really great music, and I got to sing it with them. But nobody’s musical. My brother plays the piano. But it’s not like we were pulling out our instruments like the Partridge Family or anything like that.
JL: Sometimes we’d put on a record and sing with the record but when we were at the kitchen table and my parents had a couple of whiskey’s in them, then we would be singing together. It was so much fun.
CITA: We love that story. So, alright, when you guys had your Christmas holiday, did you have albums that you would listen to as a family?
JL: Yes. In fact, we listened to the same stuff Christmas after Christmas, and they were usually compilations like … Firestone used to put out a compilation every year of pop singers doing Christmas songs and choirs as well. So, you’d have a combination of Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters, Rosemary Clooney and then some choir that did some beautiful devotional hymn. Every once in a while, I’ll hear one of those cuts on the radio for Christmas music and it just brings me back.
CITA: Yes. We had Johnny Mathis and Doris Day. One note of Johnny Mathis and we go right back.
JL: Yep, I hear you. Yeah, that’s good Christmas music.
CITA: Now we have a lot of audience here in Tampa for you, and they’ll know you mostly as Sue Sylvester from Glee. Which won’t make them different from many of your other audiences probably, but there’s a big jump from Sue Sylvester to Jane Lynch in A Swingin’ Little Christmas. So, can you just help us make this mental leap so that nobody shows up thinking it’s Sue Sylvester’s Swingin’ Little Christmas?
JL: Oh, I think they’ll adjust pretty quickly. I don’t think there’s much of an attitude adjustment. But let me tell you, though. You know Kate Flannery who was Meredith—the drunk in The Office?
CITA: Yes.
JL: She’s my very good friend, and we’ve been singing together on and off for decades. We’ve been doing sketch comedies together, and every time we would do a sketch comedy show—which was almost every night when we were coming up—we would do a song. We harmonize very well together and we have a lot of fun together. So, I enlisted here to sing with me. As soon as The Office ended, Glee ended around the same time, and I said, “Let’s hit the road.” So, we hit the road with this wonderful five-piece band and the Christmas album came out of that collaboration. The Christmas show came out of that as well.
So it’s basically A Swingin’ Little Christmas which is the album. You can get it on Amazon or iTunes. And also we’ll be selling them at the show… we’ll sign them for you. And we’re doing all of that music and it’s the late 50’s- you’re gonna love this. The late 50’s, early 60’s. Some of it’s full orchestra on the album of course; we’re only traveling with a quintet and the rest of it is a five-piece jazz stuff. We got like a Dave Brubeck [style] “Three Kings of Orient.” We’ve got a Louis Prima King Wenceslas song, so we’re all over the place. It’ll remind you of the Christmas albums you grew up with—a lot of those arrangements.
It’s going to ring true to where most of the Christmas music that endures, are songs recorded in the late 50’s or early 60’s—the Rosemary Clooney’s and the Bing Crosby’s and the Perry Como’s. We’re very much in that ilk.
CITA: Oh, we cannot wait. How much fun is this show for you, really?
JL: It’s the best! You know, we haven’t done the show since Christmas last year and we just love it. Kate and I have our shenanigans together. She’s very much a wild card and spontaneous. I’m very precise and a little bit anal retentive. It really works well within a comedy. And Tim is like our Lyle Waggoner- I don’t know if you’ll remember the Carol Burnett show? If you remember Lyle Waggoner, he was the very handsome guy who just stood there and laughed at the ladies and he’s got an amazing voice. He was the vocal arranger on Glee, so all of our songs were vocally arranged by him with some real tight three part harmonies.
CITA: Yes. Okay, so if we have not communicated how excited we are about this show, let us just reiterate. Kate Flannery is hysterical. How did you all meet each other? Were you Second City players together?
JL: Yeah. We met at the Audience Theater, which is this crazy theater that’s still around, that does wild kind of rebellious improv shows. We met doing the Real Life Brady Bunch where we did actual episodes of the Brady Bunch dressed up like the characters and it became kind of a cult hit. We traveled all over the country with it. We ended up at the Village Gate in New York for about four or five months. We bonded there and then we went onto L.A. When we all got to L.A., we did sketch comedy shows and we were going to have a theater for a month so we put together a crazy little improv-based show. Kate and I would usually do a song almost every show. So, we’ve known each other… we’ve been swimming in the same pond for probably 30 years.
CITA: That’s fantastic. Maybe this isn’t going to make any sense to you, but you and Kate are sometimes so funny we can’t laugh. You both say things in a way that’s so funny, we can’t even laugh at it. Like ninja humor. And you both have that. We can’t imagine you both onstage at the same time.
JL: Thank you. I think you’re gonna love it.
CITA: Yeah, there’s no doubt in my mind. So, you talk about Carol Burnett who I know is a huge hero, heroine to you, and you all got to perform together on Glee. One of our favorite recent things that Carol has done is when she went on Jimmy Fallon and she was teaching him her tricks for how she wouldn’t crack. And she would bite her knuckle so hard that the pain would help her keep from cracking.
JL: [laughing] Understood.
CITA: We were thinking about you and all the films that you’ve been in and how funny you are and all of these hysterical people that you have been in shows with, and how do you… how do you not crack? And when you’re on a stage with Kate, how are y’all not cracking each other up all the time?
JL: Well when I am tempted to crack up I just start saying the Hail Mary, internally. “Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee…” I just do the Hail Mary really fast, so I can get my focus on something else.
CITA: Are you good at keeping it straight?
JL: I am pretty good at it. I will give myself that. But you know, sometimes, you just can’t help it with Kate. And also, I do … I’ll crack up right in her face sometimes. I mean, it’s that kind of show. I’m allowed.
Listen to part of Jane’s interview on our podcast, Act2.
See Jane crack up in A Swingin’ Little Christmas in the Jaeb Theater this weekend, Dec. 8 and 9.